This long and winding road to sampling glory began before then, though, so who better to lead us into temptation than Wavesfactory founder Jesús
Ginard. “I’ve been a Queen fan since I was a little boy,” begins the perfectionist. “I remember listening to the Made In Heaven album
on cassette
and being absolutely amazed by it. That album totally changed my musical
perspective. Fast-forward to 2014, I saw that Metropolis Studios had
uploaded a photo of a nice Fazioli piano in one of their studios,
stating that it’s ‘...the Freddie Mercury piano.’ I know Queen recorded their last
albums there, so I asked, ‘Is this a regular piano named after Freddie Mercury or was it actually his piano?’ They answered: ‘This was his piano.’”

Fast-forwarding this significant sampling story a little further finds Jesús Ginard travelling to London in November 2015 to sample Freddie Mercury’s
Fazioli F228. “It was a dream come true — a dream I didn’t want to become a nightmare,” notes the talented Queen fan, before adding: “Apart
from
the fact that this was Freddie’s, the studio and the sound was really
magical. If done well, I thought that this could be the perfect piano
library — not
only for Queen fans, of course!".

Watch Wavefactory’s Mercury video walkthrough.

Fortunately for Wavesfactory, Metropolis’ renowned recording engineer Paul Norris helped make sure that Jesús Ginard’s
dream was well on its way to
becoming true at the recording stage alone, as evidenced by being
captured on candid camera, talking through his technical approach to
capturing
that famous Faziolo F228 sound: “We’ve
got three sets of close mics. The first is our ‘pop’ pair — Sennheiser
MKH 40s into API mic pres; our second is a pair
of [Neumann] KM 84s — sort of outside the lid, which are our sort of
classical pair — into a pair of Neve 1081s; and our third is a mono
Coles mic, for a sort
of retro sound, using a Meris mic pre, which is based on an older API
mic pre. Then there are two sets of room mics — first, we’ve got a
closer pair, which
are Neumann U87s, and then a longer, further away pair, which are
Telefunken AK-47s. We also have two plates here at Metropolis that we’re
using —
one is solid state and one is a valve plate, and we’ll take an impulse
response of them as well to have them available as different reverbs.”

Recording a total of 80GB of content at Metropolis, Jesús Ginard’s return home heralded working long and hard to perfect Mercury. “I put as much
care into the editing, design, and scripting process as I was capable of,” he explains. “Everything needed to be perfect. The library couldn’t just score
7/10; it had to be 10/10.”

One year later... the magical-sounding Mercury is
ready. After the editing process was completed by sample-cutting
supremo Elan Hickler of
Soundemote, the final file size was 60GB — down to 34GB when finally
served up as 38,000 superlative samples in Native Instruments’ NCW
(Native
Compressed Wave) format (designed to save an imported .WAV audio file
using compression so the file uses less disk space). Scripting alone
took
around nine months to complete, bringing about some features not yet
seen on other sample-based virtual instruments, paying particular
attention to
the most minimal details to make it the perfect piano library, as had
been Jesús Ginard’s dream from its inception.

Meanwhile, Mercury looks as amazing as it sounds, thanks to a gorgeous GUI (Graphical User Interface) created and rendered in 3D by Voger Design,
designers of high-end, user-friendly interfaces for audio applications. Accessible via its inspirational MAIN page — replete with a knowing nod of 3D
rendered reverence to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s classic crown and king’s robe stage outfit, Mercury’s MIXER page permits independent
control of each of those perfectly-positioned (ULTRACLOSE, CLOSE, MONO, MID, and FAR) Metropolis mics with parameters usually associated with an
audio mixing console for ‘position enhanced’ mixing; the EFFECTS page allows four DSP (Digital Signal Processing) effects to be added to the sound,
including two (EMT 140) METROPOLIS PLATES — switchable between Valve and Solid State settings with Pre Delay, High Pass, Low Pass, and Wet
controls, together with switchable settings for Short, Mid, and Long reverb times — alongside controllable COMPRESSOR, EQUALIZER, and CHORUS;
and, finally, the SETTINGS page permits creative control of any parameter any user might conceivably choose — from ROUND ROBIN settings (up to
12x with Neighbour Borrowing) to NOISES, such as sympathetic resonance (Reso) and Pedal, plus much more besides!

Watch Wavesfactory’s Mercury-making video

But sound is where the art is, surely, so how does Mercury sound?
Sophisticated, delicate, yet with a very rich bottom-end and a lot of
body resonance —
just like its inspirational namesake Fazioli F228 grand piano, put
through its paces by musical maestro Freddie Mercury on a number of
notable recordings.
Thanks to Richard Norris’ sterling engineering work at Metropolis and
subsequent months’ multi-talented editing to perfection, it has been
captured with
so much detail and depth that Mercury users can change its sound in so many different ways while always retaining natural-sounding characteristics.
Clearly, Mercury sounds
warm and emotional — perfect for intimate, low-key compositions, but it
is also very punchy and aggressive on high velocities,
a contrasting combination not usually found on other sampled-based
virtual instruments, as audibly evidenced by its impressive 42 presets.

Justifiably, Jesús Ginard concludes: “This is not a regular sample library; this is something bigger. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a whole year.
Now it’s time for you to play it, and I hope that you like it as much as we do.” Notably, Mercury is
fully compatible with Native Instruments’ NKS®
(NATIVE KONTROL STANDARD), an extended plug-in format allowing advanced
integration with the company’s cutting-edge KONTROL keyboard
controllers. If Freddie Mercury himself had played this killer
combination, he would hopefully have approved. And rightly so. Indeed,
it’s a kind of
magic, as Freddie Mercury sang so amazingly — an appropriate and
touching note to end on if ever there was one... and a fitting tribute
to the man
with the musical Midas touch to whom this tempting sample-based virtual
instrument owes its inspiration and notable name.

Mercury can be bought directly from Wavesfactory as a Native Instruments KONTAKT PLAYER (version 5.2.2)
powered sample-based virtual instrument for an introductory promo price of €99.00 EUR (incl. tax) — rising to an
RRP of €149.00 EUR (incl. VAT) on December 5, 2016 — from here: https://www.wavesfactory.com/mercury/

About Wavesfactory (www.wavesfactory.com) Jesús Ginard is the talented individual behind Wavesfactory.
Born in 1987 on the beautiful Spanish island of Mallorca, he studied
classical and modern
music and audiovisual media. He has composed original music for cinema,
television, and documentaries.Wavesfactory itself was founded in March
2010 in
Artà (Mallorca) with a goal of delivering high-quality audio tools for
musicians and engineers.Today it strives to live up to that goal by
improving each and
every release in terms of audio quality, ease of use, and powerful — but
simple — features: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” (Leonardo de Vinci)